Kabul Beauty School (18 page)

There was another flurry of sharp words from the assistant, then Roshanna nodded. “The minister doesn’t understand why there has been a problem with money, since the beauty school received so much publicity.”

Another flurry, and then Roshanna took a deep breath. “And the minister has received complaints that there was too much laughing inside the school. Also, people have complained that they have been able to look inside and see the women without their head scarves.”

I had tried to breach this gulf over the next few weeks. I stopped in three times to tell the minister’s assistant that we had some extra room in the class. I suggested that if the ministry had any girls in mind for the school, we’d be happy to put them right into the next class. I also offered to do hair for everyone in the ministry for free. Roshanna came with me the last time. I saw her eyes widen as she caught sight of a paper on the assistant’s desk. When we got outside, she whispered, “They’re going to evict you! The paper said they are going to take the building back and keep all of your products!”

I called and visited everyone I knew, looking for someone who had enough clout to plead our case successfully to the Women’s Ministry. One of my customers was an Afghan-American woman who had both political and family power in Kabul. She went to work on her network of contacts. When she called me back, I was sure it was to tell me that she’d found the right string to pull. But her voice was full of regret. “You’re lost,” she said. “They’re taking everything.”

“We paid for that building, and we’re supposed to have it for two years. They signed an agreement!”

She sighed. “Whatever you do now, do it very fast.”

Of course, the first thing I did was to shriek like a madwoman. Everyone in the house went running for safety. I threw myself on my bed and cried to think of all that hard work, all those wonderful products the beauty companies had donated, all the trust that the students and people at home had put in me. I cried for about an hour, or maybe six—I lost track. Then I stopped crying and took the much more satisfying path of anger. My parents had raised me to be a strong woman—a fighter—and I was going to be strong about this. “Over my dead fucking body will they take this school,” I told my pillow.

It was Friday, the beginning of the weekend in Afghanistan, and school was supposed to begin on Saturday. So Ali and I called about five taxicabs. Sam got back from a meeting as they pulled up in front of the guesthouse, and I explained my plan to him. “You’re a crazy woman!” he exclaimed. “You can’t fight the Women’s Ministry. They’ll have you arrested.” But he was a fighter, just like me. In that way, we were well matched. I explained my plan. I told him to get a truck and meet me near the ministry with some workers. So he found a truck, then swung by one of the mosques and loaded it with guys who were squatting in front waiting for jobs. All of us pulled up along the street in front of the ministry, but back far enough so that the chowkidors couldn’t see us.

My plan rested on the fact that there were two doors to the beauty school. One of them was inside the ministry compound, and that was the door we usually used after passing through the gates. But there was another, small door to the school, in the compound wall, about thirty feet away from the gates. We used this door if the gates were locked or if there were too many other things going on in the compound yard. I unlocked this little door, and all of us filed silently into the school. Ali unfolded sheets and blankets on the floors, and we started piling them with bottles of shampoo, conditioner, color, and other products, then carried them out to the taxis and truck. I laid out all my scarves on the floor and filled them with nail polish and makeup, and we carried these out, too. Then I pulled my mannequin heads off the shelves and gave two to each of the men from the mosque. They wrapped their arms around them wonderingly and tiptoed outside. I had also brought my suitcases and some boxes, and we filled these up with whatever was left. By the time we finished, the only things in the beauty school were the styling stations, a television for showing videos, and the mirrors.

Sam borrowed money from everyone he knew, then went off to look for a guesthouse to rent. We wanted something suitable not only for a new location for the school but also for his business offices and our living quarters. There was no way that the beauty school would fit into our current guesthouse, and besides, we were both tired of the other people who were staying there. We liked Ali well enough but didn’t like the men he had been renting rooms to. It might seem crazy for us to have picked up and moved everything like that, but frankly, Afghans did it without breaking a sweat. They had fled conflict and hardship so many times that they were really good at relocating in a hurry. Our only problem was the constant problem: money. Kabul landlords typically demand six months of rent up front, and we weren’t sure we could find something in our price range so soon. If we moved the beauty school away from the ministry, it would be more expensive to operate, too. In exchange for Beauty Without Borders’ having spent some fifty thousand dollars to build the school inside the compound, the ministry paid for our electricity, water, heat, and security.

On Saturday morning, little Hama—I had decided to let her into the class—and I walked to the Women’s Ministry arm in arm as if nothing were amiss. Baseera, Topekai, and my other students and teachers were already there waiting for me, crowded around the door with big smiles. If they noticed that the place had been cleaned out, they didn’t mention it. And it didn’t really matter that we didn’t have any products to work with, because I wanted to have a first-day orientation anyway. I talked about the goals of the program. I talked about my expectations. I told them there were lots of women who wanted to get into this program, so I wouldn’t tolerate stealing or unexcused tardiness or absenteeism. I told them that I would be giving each of them a kit with everything she needed for the whole three months, and that this kit could not leave the building. We had had problems in the first class with the girls losing or breaking things, and we just couldn’t afford it. I got so wrapped up with my vision of how this second class was going to run that I almost forgot the crisis looming just outside the door.

Now the crisis was under way. The minister’s assistant was standing right in front of me, frosty but polite. We did the formal greeting—three kisses on the cheeks—because you don’t skip that in Afghanistan, even with your worst enemy. Then she started ranting and raving in Dari. The student who was translating couldn’t keep up with her. All of us just stared as this woman went on and on, working herself into a lather and gesturing with such force that she almost toppled off her high heels. She was addressing the crowd as well as me. All of a sudden, everyone looked at me and gasped.

“What did she say?” I asked my horrified student.

“She says that you are not a good teacher, and that the ministry will open its own school here. She says you have been stealing from both the foreign beauty corporations and the Afghans. She says”—my student started to sob—“she says that she is going to drag you out of the compound by your hair and that you will be arrested and thrown out of the country.”

The assistant swung around then and glared at me. “Why is it that I seem to care more about these women than you do, even though I’m an American and you’re Afghan?” I said to her, tears streaming. She stepped forward as if she were going to slap me.

Suddenly, Sam was standing next to me. I felt as if the cavalry had just arrived! He held a hurried conversation with my students to find out what was going on, then coaxed me out to the street. I was hysterical, but he was calm. He lit a cigarette for each of us, then we went to see just about everyone in Kabul who could do anything about this, from government officials to Mary MacMakin. In the end, so many complaints were lodged against the Women’s Ministry that they caved in. They eventually gave us back all our stuff, and I apologized for any cultural insensitivity on my part that might have contributed to the dispute. Bottom line, the Women’s Ministry wanted our building, our supplies, and control over the school. They kept the building, and I’ve never set foot in it again.

Sam had come to the ministry initially to tell me that he had found us a new location. It was a roomy stucco guesthouse called the Peacock Manor, with a small outbuilding near the street that would be perfect for the beauty school. It was going to take $22,000 to prepay six months’ rent, but we put together our money with some from Noor and Ali and signed a contract for a year. We were pretty confident that we could eventually fill its rooms with paying guests and make good on the investment. Both Sam and I and Ali planned to take rooms there ourselves.

Before we moved in, Sam and I went to inspect the building we wanted to use for the school. I picked up an old shoe that was lying in the rubble on the floor and threw it into a little room at the back. A woman with big, startled eyes peered out from behind its door. She was broad-shouldered and sturdy, with the kind of wide, high-cheekboned face that reminded me of American Indians. She was very dirty, her face and arms smudged, her shapeless tunic torn and stained. I thought she was homeless, but Sam questioned her sharply and discovered that she came with the compound. Kind of like the sinks and the toilets.

“His name Shaz.” Sam never got his gender pronouns right. “He make good cleaner for school and guesthouse.”

“How much do I have to pay her?”

“Eighty dollar a month, probably.” He walked off to try one of the light switches.

“Salaam aleichem,” I said to Shaz. “My name is Debbie.”

She just stared at me, then backed into the little room.

The next day Sam hired men from the mosque to knock out walls, put in a bathroom and plumbing for the sinks, build shelves, and help me paint. Shaz painted right along with me, and I was pleased by the energy and muscle she put into her work. But the walls were so cracked that regular paint only seemed to emphasize their flaws. I finally sent her to get a bucket of sand from a construction site across the street and dumped it in my paint. Then I mixed it around, painted a swath, and stopped to gauge the effect. I turned around to see what my helpers thought of this impromptu texturizing. The men were standing there with their mouths open and their brushes dripping midair. They seemed to think I had lost my mind, but Shaz smiled for the first time. She had several gold teeth, a startling contrast to her dirty face and drab clothes.

I nearly did lose my mind a few days later, when we were moving the salon furniture from the Women’s Ministry into the school at the Peacock Manor. After getting one load of boxes inside, I heard an odd noise coming in the window and went back out to find a young cow tied to the fender of a nearby truck. It was nibbling around the edge of the front tire and mooing so loudly that I had to laugh. I didn’t know why it was tied up in front of our guesthouse, but I had learned by now to expect this sort of thing in Afghanistan. I petted it for a minute, then went back inside to continue unpacking boxes. I kept hearing the cow mooing, and the sound soothed me. It was like something I’d have heard back in Michigan when I was a child and had about a million pets.

The next time I walked out to get a new box, I nearly slipped into what seemed like a street of blood. Someone had slaughtered the cow right outside the door. They were making steaks out of it just a few feet away. I didn’t have the luxury of going to my room and hiding in the dark. I had to keep moving boxes the rest of the day, careful not to track blood inside or look at the little cow’s head, now tilted lifelessly on top of the crumpled heap of its empty skin.

I
rampaged through the kitchen cupboards, then finally spotted a small tray of biscuits wrapped in a napkin. I whipped off the napkin and rushed into the living room. “Salaam aleichem,” I said for the fourth or fifth time to the man who was pacing in front of the windows facing the street. He jerked around to glare at me, one end of his black turban quivering above his head, the other twisted in his hand. Then he brushed past me to stomp upstairs so that he could stare at the street from the window in his room. A few minutes later he stomped back down, went outside, and jerked the gate to the street open. He spoke to our chowkidor, who shrank back against the wall as if the black-turbaned man were breathing fire.

Then someone from the Ministry of Commerce called. “The business seminar ended late,” the woman on the other end of the phone said. “Traffic is pretty bad, too, so Nahida won’t be home for a while.”

“What do I do about her husband?” I asked. “He’s going nuts.”

“Calm him down!” she said. “Get someone to explain it to him, or he’ll beat her.”

“He’d beat her right in front of me?”

“He’s Taliban, you know—they’re pretty strict with their wives.”

“He’s Taliban?” I felt my mouth go dry. I figured that if I didn’t find a way to please this guy, I might wind up dragged behind a camel on a one-way trip to the desert. “Is there anything else you forgot to tell me about him?”

“Well, he’s an opium addict, too. You want to stay away from him if he looks like he needs to go off and smoke.”

When Sam and I took over the Peacock Manor Guesthouse, there were a lot of people coming in and out for parties but no paying guests. Our first real guests were a woman named Nahida and her husband, a bad-tempered, scar-faced man from the city of Herat.

Everything I knew about running a business was confined to beauty salons. I knew nothing about a business in which you were supposed to feed people and keep a clean house for them. Plus, I wanted this guesthouse to have the kinds of amenities that would make it appeal to journalists and other Westerners, so I knew it needed a lot of work. But I figured I could take my time getting it up to speed.

Then I got a phone call from an NGO based in Herat, which is far to the west of Kabul, near the border between Afghanistan and Iran. The NGO told me that a twenty-one-year-old girl named Nahida had come to them and begged them to help her become a student at the beauty school. She had heard about the school from a relative who lived in Kabul, and she was desperate to attend and then open her own salon in Herat. Her biggest obstacle was neither distance nor money; it was her husband. The NGO had scrambled to figure out a way to appease her husband and make it possible for Nahida to attend the school. They talked to her relatives in Kabul, who promised that Nahida and her husband and their child could live with them for free. The NGO also promised to send her to business management classes and help her open her salon in Herat. All this was starting to sound pretty good to her husband, who wasn’t working at the time. But he was concerned about the moral atmosphere at the beauty school and the character of the people running it, so the NGO wanted me to let them stay at the Peacock Manor for a week to reassure the husband on both counts.

Talk about pressure! I had only about a week to make sure the guesthouse was running smoothly enough to accommodate guests and, especially, to assure the husband that I was showing the proper reverence for the ways Afghans did things. The guesthouse was missing a lot of things when we took over. It had beds but no pillows and blankets, pans but no glasses. Worst of all, it was missing a teapot and teacups. There’s almost nothing more important to an Afghan than tea. Sam and I went out shopping for this stuff, but I had no idea what to buy. And I had no idea how to go about making tea once I got everything back to the guesthouse. I was used to boiling water and dumping in a tea bag, but I knew Afghans went through a much more elaborate process to make tea. They could all tell by the taste if it had been done right. I was really getting nervous about this week with Nahida and her husband, and the tea-making was the first big hurdle.

To make things worse, they arrived two days early. Sam and I hadn’t even slept in the guesthouse yet ourselves, but we drove over to meet them. They were standing next to our chowkidor, one of the three workers who had been kidnapped. Along with the others, he had been found unharmed in a cave guarded by ten Taliban. He was so traumatized after three months of capture that he couldn’t work in the well-drilling business anymore, so Sam had hired him as our guard. He was too traumatized to do that, too. Most of the time, he’d just sit at the kitchen table and cry. It appeared as if he had been crying again, because his eyes were all red and he hiccuped when he talked. Nahida’s husband glowered at him, then turned to look at me as if he had already decided that I was an unfit instructor for his wife. But Nahida—a caramel-skinned girl with determined black eyes—grabbed my hands and kissed me. “Thank you for welcoming us,” she said.

Sam went out to buy kebabs, rice, and nan for dinner. Nahida quickly picked the guest room with two twin beds, and she and her husband began to settle in. While they were upstairs, I tried to get the tea going. It took me a while to light the gas stove, since I had used only electric before. Then I stood there looking at the pot of water and the tin of tea, trying to figure out if I was supposed to throw the tea in the water before or after it boiled. I heard a little cough behind me, and it was Nahida, her head still tightly covered. “Let me help you!” she said, and then she took over. She did it sweetly, too, trying not to make me look like a total incompetent. Even though Sam hadn’t married me for my tea-making abilities, I knew he might be ashamed if we served bad tea to the Talib. I was grateful to Nahida for her help, although as she moved around the kitchen with such practiced deliberation, I wondered at her middle-aged demeanor. It seemed as if something had completely stripped her youth from her. We didn’t get a chance to talk much that first night, though. We ate and then sat in the living room watching a Bollywood movie. I turned up the volume so we couldn’t hear the chowkidor weeping in the kitchen.

The next day Nahida had to attend a business seminar at the Ministry of Commerce. Sam had to go off to work, and her husband had to stay at the Peacock Manor with me while I was trying to fix up the space for the school. I tried to be polite when we were in the same room, but he turned away abruptly every time he saw me. I think he was alarmed that I had the gall to leave my head uncovered in my own house. As the day went on, he grew more and more agitated.

After the Ministry of Commerce called, I approached the husband cautiously and tried to explain the problem. He just scowled at my feeble Dari, so I phoned Sam and told him what was going on. “You talk to him,” I begged, then handed the phone to the Talib. He held my phone to his ear for a few seconds, then snapped it shut and dropped it on the table. I thought he was going to hit me, but then Nahida ran in the door and began to speak to him breathlessly. He lunged for her before she was able to remove her shoes and dragged her up to their room. I phoned Sam again.

“You have to come back right now!” I shouted. “She’s going to get the snot kicked out of her!”

“I’m coming, I’m coming!” Sam shouted back. “I am on our street.”

I could hear the Talib yelling and Nahida screaming. It sounded as if he was breaking a chair against the wall. At that moment, Sam rushed inside and called the husband. Amazingly, he left off beating Nahida and came downstairs.

“Let’s break his legs now,” I whispered, but Sam ignored me. He was right: Nahida was probably the one who would suffer for it in the end. So I went upstairs and found her trembling on her bed. I pulled her into my room, and we spent the night talking.

Nahida told me that her bad luck had started when she was born into a family with four girls and only one boy. For families in a country where the girls can’t get jobs, having a lot of daughters is considered a hardship. Her family never made her feel unwelcome, though. Her parents were loving if poor, and her childhood was a happy one. Then the Taliban came into power. Her family tried to keep their girls hidden, but a neighbor who wanted to curry favor whispered about their beautiful, unmarried daughters. So one day, this forty-five-year-old Talib policeman came and demanded that her parents give her to him. He wasn’t even offering a dowry, and this is considered out-and-out theft in Afghanistan. His only offer was that he wouldn’t kill Nahida’s father if he agreed to let her marry. Nahida was only sixteen and hated the Talib, but she wanted to protect her father. She agreed to the marriage.

When the Talib brought her back to his house after the wedding, she was surprised to find out that he already had another wife, an older woman who was enraged that this young woman had to become part of her home. The first wife had borne the Talib five daughters, but he wanted Nahida because he hoped she could produce a son. Sons are much valued in Afghanistan, because when they marry they continue to live with the parents and help support them. So Nahida became a slave not only to the Talib but also to the first wife. She was an unruly slave, as she would rather take a beating than do things she didn’t want to do. She refused sex with him for a while and was beaten for it every time.

“Here are the scars,” she said, as if she were showing me trophies. She reached behind her to pull up her tunic, then bent over. Her back was scribbled with marks of all sizes, some merely flat and discolored, some that were barely healed. She pointed out the cigarette burns on her feet and stomach, the places no one could see.

Nahida had hoped that the Talib would tire of her rebellion and divorce her. Even though divorce was considered to be the most shameful thing that could happen to a woman, she thought it far preferable to this marriage. Then she got pregnant and had a son. To her way of thinking, this was the worst thing that could happen. Suddenly she was his favored wife, and she knew he’d never let her go. She was so miserable that she wanted to kill herself. She even poured some gasoline on her clothes one day. Self-immolation was sort of a trend among Herat’s desperate housewives. But she saw her little boy staring at her and couldn’t go through with it.

Then Nahida discovered that she was able to parlay her new status to get a little more freedom. When the Taliban were driven out of power, she told her husband that she was going to get a job and that he couldn’t stop her. She wandered around Herat listening for the sound of foreigners. When she heard a group of people speaking English, she followed them and convinced them to help her. She said she knew that no Afghan was going to be able to help her. She was smart and soon became both computer literate and an English speaker. She managed to save a little money by embroidering things at home and selling them to the foreigners. All she wanted now was to get away from her husband.

“I’ve been raped by him over and over, beaten by him and his first wife, and their children spit on me,” she concluded, touching one of the scars on the bottom of her foot. “I am happy only when he’s smoking his opium. I pray every night that he will die.”

As that week went on, I was really afraid that Sam and I were failing the test. Nahida realized that I was hopeless in the kitchen, so she’d sneak in there and prepare a proper meal so I could carry it out and pretend I had made it. Regardless, the Talib husband was always angry about something. He quickly decided that he hated Sam, because he was a Pashtun and Sam was an Uzbek, and they had fought on opposite sides during the war. I tried everything I could think of to appease Nahida’s husband, knowing that he wouldn’t let her join my third class if he hated me. But nothing worked. He was always shouting at her or smoking his opium or pretending not to see me as he watched television.

Two nights before they left, I was in bed dreaming that I was falling down the stairs. I woke up because Sam was shaking me. When I opened my eyes, I saw that he was on the other side of the room looking for his gun, but I was still shaking. “Earthquake!” he said. “Get out now!” A pile of books on my nightstand slid to the floor, and the glass in the window broke with a loud pop. I screamed and clambered out of bed, more frightened than I’d ever been in my life. It was cold and dark, and the floor was shuddering under my feet. I could hear people outside shouting and crying, and I was sure the house was going to come crashing down on our heads any minute. I was already imagining us buried in the rubble with the weeping chowkidor trying to dig us out with a spoon. I rushed into the dark hallway and collided with someone, then slid down the steps and ran out the front door.